The recently completed Opera Park by Danish architecture studio Cobe softens the glassy sharpness that permeates much of Copenhagen’s harbour front. The 21,500 sqm development in one of the Danish city’s inner harbours consists of six gardens, a greenhouse, a café, an underground parking, and a landscaped bridge connecting the park to the adjacent Royal Danish Opera. For over 20 years, the area next to the Opera remained an open lawn equivalent to the size of three soccer fields, and untouched by any urban development that populated the city. When the time came, instead of getting a new housing that otherwise seemed an obvious choice of habitation, the site welcomed a green space – a respite seen amid burgeoning construction in the Danish capital, and a lack of verdant pockets surrounding inner harbours. Copenhagen is the city where eccentric ideas flourish – from ski slopes sheathing waste treatment plants to climbing walls featured on multi-storey carparks – Cobe’s vision of the park adds to the city’s rich assemblage of inventive public spaces.

Within the core park are six gardens accented by landscape features which include a fountain, a water lily pond, and a reflecting pool, whereas the site is knitted together by meandering walkways and organic-looking flowerbeds. The gardens—North American Forest, the Danish Oak Forest, the Nordic Forest, the Oriental Garden, the English Garden, and the Subtropical Garden nestled within a greenhouse and atrium at its centre—feature a variety of local and exotic plant species from around the world. Over 600 trees, 80,000 herbaceous perennials and bushes, and 40,000 bulb plants sourced from different locations dot the site. The curation of plants allows the to park thrive all year round (serving as a counterpoint to the city’s parks that turn desolate in winter) and paint poetic palettes as seasons rise and wane.

The project, initiated by The A.P. Møller Foundation—a Danish philanthropic commercial entity—appointed Cobe when it won a competition for the park’s design in 2019. Given the park’s close proximity to the Royal Danish Opera and soon-to-be-completed Paper Island (an industrial paper factory site turned into a public destination, also designed by Cobe), the park appears as a pleasing diversion from the cold greys and blues of the buildings dotting the harbour. “The Opera Park is a place where nature comes first amidst Copenhagen’s bustling urban development. With its six gardens, winding paths and carefully crafted viewpoints, the project seizes elements of Copenhagen’s historical, romantic gardens to tackle today’s challenges such as decline in biodiversity and water management,” says Dan Stubbergaard, Founder of Cobe and Professor at the Harvard University.

Beyond the gardens, the park’s site also houses an organic-shaped greenhouse which has a café and an underground parking. The structure features a hovering green roof, sporting a tessellation of circular skylights and tiny apertures proliferating on the underside, whereas a continuous wave-like glazed wall forms the outer enclosure. Trees and plantations emerge from around café interiors, informal pockets, central internal staircase, and other transition spaces. The greenhouse descends into a parking space that can accommodate over 300 cars. A landscaped bridge emerges out of the parking facility, housing atop it a covered meandering walkway that connects the facility to the adjacent Royal Danish Opera. “As one of three bridges to the island,” enclosed by curved glass walls and a floating roof, “the connection is designed as a piece of nature crossing the harbour canal, fully integrating landscape and architecture into one,” mentions the design statement.

The materiality of the landscape architectural elements is chosen to keep in mind its benefits from rain and sun all year round and to create a sustainable complex. Pathways feature a permeable gravel surface that channels rainwater into rain beds; green roofs of the landscaped bridge and greenhouse capture rainwater for various utilities on the site; solar panels provide power to the underground parking, park and the greenhouse; and the elevated terrain safeguards the site from flooding.

The Opera Park, as per Stubbergaard, is a composed landscape with a foreground, a middle ground and a background. “The terrain and trees,” he says, "are tallest where they create the background, and lowest in the foreground towards the harbour.” Speaking of the positioning of the park in the Danish capital, the architect concludes. “As you stroll through the park, you get the feeling of having left the city and being immersed in nature, almost forgetting you are in the middle of the dense city centre.”